The fall of Damascus to Tiglath-pileser, in 732 B. C., caused general consternation in Palestine. Ahaz had already asked aid of the Assyrian against Israel and the Syrians, and he now hasted to offer tribute to the conqueror, whose troops were overrunning Gilead and Galilee, and raided even to Philistia. On the occasion of his visit to Damascus, Ahaz is said to have seen an altar on which he sacrificed, and a copy of which he introduced into the Temple at Jerusalem, displacing Solomon’s bronze altar which he reserved “to inquire by.”[131] There appears to have been a “covered place” in the Temple adorned with gold or silver, as was also the “king’s entry,” and these were now stripped to pay Tiglath-pileser.[132] Ten years later Samaria was captured by Sargon, and it was then perhaps--or in 711 B. C., when Sargon captured Ashdod--that the Assyrian outposts appeared at Nob near Mizpeh, where the most distant glimpse of Jerusalem is caught from the north.[133] [Sidenote: SILOAM] Ahaz had been succeeded by Hezekiah six years before the fall--in 722 B. C.--of Samaria. Preparations for a siege, such as might now be expected, continued to be made at Jerusalem. The older account merely tells us that Hezekiah “made a pool and a conduit, and brought water into the city”; the later independent statement says that besides adding a new outer wall, and repairing “the Millo in the city of David,” he stopped all the fountains and “the brook that flowed through the midst of the ground,” and moreover “dammed the source of the waters of the Upper Gihon, and made it straight below, westwards to [or, for] the city of David.”[134] Whether this was a completion and improvement of the Siloam tunnel begun by Ahaz, or a new tunnel to supersede the older one which may perhaps have already led from the Kidron spring, is not clear; but the characters in which the Siloam inscription--recording the making of the tunnel--are written seem to be nearest to those found on Phœnician weights, in Assyria, which are rather later than the time of Ahaz. This inscription is the oldest of Jerusalem monuments as yet found, and is indeed the oldest purely Hebrew text known. It is of great importance as showing the civilisation of Hezekiah’s age, which, however, is equally attested by the historic cylinder of Sennacherib.